Addresses by the right reverend Phillips Brooks eBook

I want to read to you again the words of Jesus in
the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John:
“Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed
on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my
disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free. They answered
him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in
bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall
be made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily,
I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant
of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house
for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the
Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free
indeed.” The service of God is not self-restraint,
but self-indulgence. That is the first truth
of all religion. That is the truth which we found
uttered in those words of Jesus when we were thinking
of them the other day. That is the truth to which
we return as we come back again to think of those
words and all that they mean and all that the speaker
of them means to us and to our lives. When we
remember that truth, when we recognize that no man
is ever to be saved except by the fulfilment of his
own nature, and not by the restraint of his nature,
when we recognize that no man, no personal, individual
man, is ever to be ransomed from his sins except by
having opened to him a larger and fuller life into
which he has entered, we seem to have displayed to
us a large region, into which we are tempted to enter,
and which is so rich and inviting to us that we immediately
begin to ask ourselves if it is possible that there
should be such a region. It is simply a great
dream that we set before us. It is something
that we imagine, something that comes out of the imaginations
and anticipations of our own hearts, simply stimulated
by the possibilities of the life in which we are living.
It would be very much indeed, if it were only that.
It would bear a certain testimony of itself, if it
simply came out of the perpetual dissatisfaction of
men’s souls, even if there were no distinct
manifestation of that life and no possibility of entering
into it at once with our own personal consecration,
with the resolution of our own wills. But if it
were simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away
out of the thoughts of men. It is impossible
that men should keep on, year after year, age after
age, this simple dream of something which does not
exist. It would be like those pictures which
the poet has drawn, something which appeals to nothing
in our human nature and stands only as a parable of
something that is a great deal lower than itself.
The poet pictures to us in his imagination those things
which do not appeal to our life, because they find
nothing to correspond to their high portraits, to show
those transformations of nature into something that
is entirely different and foreign to itself.
If religion be simply the dream that some men hold
it to be, if it simply be the cheating of man’s
soul with that which has no reality to correspond